Sally Tallant, the director of the Queens Museum in New York, has been named director of the Hayward Gallery and visible arts on the Southbank Centre in London. She takes over from Ralph Rugoff who will step down in spring after 20 years within the submit. “I’m very excited as I like the Hayward and Southbank and am wanting ahead to returning to London,” she tells The Artwork Newspaper. She’s going to take up the position from July.
Tallant labored as an assistant curator on the Hayward Gallery in 2001, helping on the exhibition Info of Life: Modern Japanese Artwork (2002). She says she now goals to “construct on the excellent legacy of Rugoff, shaping the following chapter of this important cultural vacation spot and civic establishment”. Rugoff will in the meantime “present curatorial oversight” for a significant retrospective of the UK artist Anish Kapoor, launching on the Hayward Gallery in June.
Tallant was chargeable for an formidable $65m capital marketing campaign at Queens Museum, including artwork storage, a brand new auditorium and conservation services to the constructing, which is the one remaining construction developed for the primary New York World’s Truthful in 1939-40. She has additionally overseen the event of the Suna Youngsters’s Museum, which is scheduled to open in 2028 on the museum website.
The Queens Museum’s exhibition programme beneath Tallant has included exhibits devoted to artists together with Lyle Ashton Harris, Stephanie Dinkins, Charisse Pearlina Weston and Emilie Gossiaux. As director, she additionally commissioned six everlasting public works for Delta Airways Terminal B at LaGuardia Airport, New York, by artists corresponding to Rashid Johnson and Virginia Overton.
Tallant was the creative director and the chief govt of the Liverpool Biennial from 2011 to 2019, overseeing 4 editions. In line with her CV, she raised $3.6m for every biennial version and led a crew of 15 everlasting and 100 pageant employees. From 2001 to 2011, she was head of programmes on the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Tallant joins the UK’s largest arts centre at an important time—throughout its seventy fifth anniversary yr. Misan Harriman, the chair of the Southbank Centre, says in a press release: “As we replicate on our 75-year historical past, it’s important that we replicate the braveness and creativity of the world we reside in at present… [Tallant’s] imaginative and prescient will likely be instrumental in making certain the Hayward Gallery stays a beacon of cultural excellence and a house for essentially the most important voices in modern artwork.”
In line with The Artwork Newspaper’s annual customer figures survey, the entire attendance for the Hayward Gallery in 2024 was 182,419.
